Sunday, February 20, 2011

Shed Skin 0.7.1, Help needed!

I have just uploaded the tarball for Shed Skin 0.7.1, which fixes several important problems in 0.7, and adds a few minor features. The Windows version and hopefully the Debian/Fedora packages will follow shortly. As usual, please see the release notes for an overview of all the changes.

There aren't any major new features, because I haven't received much feedback since 0.7. Please let me know if you run into any problem, so it can be fixed, or if you know of some interesting program I could play with! I'd also like to take this opportunity to ask for some help in specific areas.

Excitingly, Thomas Spura was able to get Shed Skin 0.7 accepted in the Fedora repositories! :D Thanks to Thomas for that! Inspired by this, I'd like to hear from anyone who might be interested in assisting/motivating Paul Boddie to get his Debian package accepted in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories. I think if it got past the scrutiny of the Fedora people, this shouldn't be too hard.. :-)

I would also really appreciate to see some description of Shed Skin on Wikipedia (again), because I think it deserves this, especially since the scalability improvements in 0.6. But also of course because it sends lots of users to the homepage. If you'd like to work on this, please see this thread with links to independent blog entries and even a book that describe or benchmark Shed Skin. For a summary of how the type inference part works, please see my recent 0.7 announcement.

Since a while, inspired by the LibreOffice project, there has also been a page in the Shed Skin wiki that lists some easy tasks that one could try and tackle, to hopefully make it easier to start contributing to Shed Skin. I try hard not to fix these problems myself, in the hope someone else will pick them up.

update: I just added another great new example to the 0.7.1 tarball, a quantum monte carlo simulator by Mark Dewing. shedskin takes about 10 minutes on my PC to analyze its 1,200 lines of code (sloccount).

that's great to hear! :D I do hope you are willing to modify it somewhat, now and over time, to keep the wikipedia editors happy, or they will surely simply delete the whole page again. I see there's already a 'notability' warning above it.. :) please see this thread for some independent references to shedskin, including a book, that might be useful here:

in any case, you should probably remove the "typical speedup" part, because the benchmarks were selected and the measurements done by someone who is hugely biased of course.. :-) you might refer to some links in the above thread instead.

they may also complain about text coming more or less straight from the shedskin homepage, but if I recall I already explicitly allowed that.. :P

A much better choice would have been the same license as Python, which is a lot less restrictive than GPLv3. A simpler license like BSD, MIT, ISC, or CC0 would be better still. It's much easier to switch now than later.

Thanks for the reply... and sorry my too late reply... I am really busy at my work...

I really have to do a "deep" research on what I need from SS to help me in porting my app, but, I will need to delay it for some time... I also need to do some study about SS to be sure on what I am talking about LOL.....

So, for short, when I can, I will visit your discussion group, and I will post there.